A strange idea that won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize has now cleared its first test in people. In a trial published in the journal Med, 27 healthy men in Japan held up to 1.5 liters of an oxygen-carrying liquid in their rectums for as long as an hour, and none suffered serious harm.
The technique, called enteral ventilation, aims to move oxygen into the bloodstream through the intestine when the lungs cannot do the job. But the trial delivered no oxygen at all, and at least one lung failure specialist argues that simple arithmetic is the method's biggest obstacle.
